Nipple Outrage

A sign of the times: New mothers protest for right to show nipples on the internet:

Web-savvy moms who breast-feed are irate that social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace restrict photos of nursing babies. The disputes reveal how the sites' community policing techniques sometimes struggle to keep up with the booming number and diversity of their members.

Facebook began as a site just for college kids, but now it is an online home for 140 million people from all over the world. Among the new faces of Facebook are women like Kelli Roman, 23, who last year posted a photo of herself nursing one of her two children.

One day, she logged on to find the photo missing. When she pressed Facebook for an explanation, she got form e-mails in return.

Facebook bars people from uploading anything "obscene, pornographic or sexually explicit" — a policy that translates into a ban on pictures depicting certain amounts of exposed flesh.

Roman responded by starting a Facebook group called "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!"

I've been half following this story over the past week or so, and not just because my first jacking material was a black-and-white You're a Mom Now book - complete with breastfeeding and where-babies-come-from-pics, but also because I'm totally fascinated with all things social networking.

I'm not sure I really get the draw of a site like facebook (although now that I know that young mothers are posting pictures of their nipples on the site, I may spend a bit more time changing my status to things like "Rob is jerking off to you breastfeeding"), but I'm intrigued by how fast this stuff has exploded into mainstream culture.